Every dog has his day

Mr. Blue takes his own advice and bids adieu.

By Garrison Keillor

Mr. Blue thanks you for your kind and funny notes in the wake of his heart operation, from which he is slowly mending, thank you very much. Still not bench-pressing Volkswagens or joining the rugby scrum, but able to sit at the table with everyone else and make appropriate responses.

The convalescent life is a good life, just like in the movies. You sit in a chair with a blanket over your lap and soak up sunshine on a brick patio and someone brings you tea and toast and various visitors come and converse gently on pleasant low-impact topics and inquire as to your well-being: What’s not to like?

A heart operation is one of the best medical adventures one can have. The art is highly advanced, the prognosis is good and if you’re at a great hospital (which I was), you can take a jaunty approach to the thing, joke with the nurses, smile gallantly at your loved ones in preop and march bravely into the darkness. And then the light shines again. And then you start to learn something about yourself and your nature in time of illness (reclusive). You feel the primal urge to crawl deep into the cave and lie in the dark and lick your wounds and comprehend this large experience. You appreciate the solitude. You do not want too many well-wishers, men in clown suits, etc. In my book, nobody should ever feel bad about not phoning or visiting the sick. The sick man has much to think about and you shouldn’t try to dissuade him.

Illness offers the chance to think long thoughts about the future (praying that we yet have one, dear God), and so I have, and so this is the last column of Mr. Blue, under my authorship, for Salon.

Over the years, Mr. Blue’s strongest advice has come down on the side of freedom in our personal lives, freedom from crushing obligation and overwork and family expectations and the freedom to walk our own walk and be who we are. And some of the best letters have been addressed to younger readers trapped in jobs like steel suits, advising them to bust loose and go off and have an adventure. Some of the advisees have written back to inform Mr. Blue that the advice was taken and that the adventure changed their lives. This was gratifying.

So now I am simply taking my own advice. Cut back on obligations: Promote a certain elegant looseness in life. Simple as that. Winter and spring, I almost capsized from work, and in the summer I had a week in St. Mary’s Hospital to sit and think, and that’s the result. Every dog has his day and I’ve had mine and given whatever advice was mine to give (and a little more). It was exhilarating to get the chance to be useful, which is always an issue for a writer (What good does fiction do?), and Mr. Blue was a way to be useful. Nothing human is beneath a writer’s attention; the basic questions about how to attract a lover and what to do with one once you get one and how to deal with disappointment in marriage are the stuff that fiction is made from, so why not try to speak directly? And so I did. And now it’s time to move on.

So adieu to Mr. Blue. My thanks to Ruth Henrich, who is in the pantheon of great copy editors, and also to the wily Web tycoon David Talbot, and special thanks to all the correspondents who generously shared their qualms and predicaments. Do good work and be well and enjoy your life.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

Dear Mr. Blue,

Ah, where to begin?

I am 36, widowed two years ago when my wife and children were killed in an accident. I have recovered to where I feel social again and have developed a good friendship with a woman who is my doctoral advisor and mentor in graduate school, divorced nine months ago, no children. We have known each other well for seven years, and after her husband left her, we spent many hours talking about life and loss, sadness and pain, happiness and hope, etc. There has been on many occasions the unmistakable spark of romantic interest. She is intelligent, beautiful, funny and, like me, alone. I find myself continually drawn more to her.

Now I have a formal social engagement where I need to bring a date. Neither of us has dated since we became single again. How should I invite her? I don’t want to risk the friendship by seeming too eager for romance, but I think I need to take the chance.

Clueless

Dear Clueless,

You pick up a telephone and dial her number and when you reach her, you ask her to join you for the social engagement. Or, if the time for that is past, you ask her to have dinner or go to a movie. This is not a treacherous slope, it’s ordinary social interaction. It is to put you and her on a different social footing, to change the parameters of what’s permissible or expected so as to clear the way for the expression of personal feeling. Don’t be afraid. Call her. You do need to take the chance. If you can’t bring yourself to do it, write back and I’ll tell you the same thing.

Dear Mr. Blue,

I’ve been dating a great guy for the past eight months. He’s kind, gentle and funny, and we are fundamentally great friends and companions. However, he is Dutch and will return to Holland within the next year — plans that don’t include me. He hasn’t asked me to go, and I don’t think I’m ready to start a new life in a foreign country.

Most of the time I’m happy with his companionship, but sometimes I find it hard to deal with the given expiration date on our relationship and wonder if I shouldn’t be devoting my energies and emotions toward someone with whom I could share a future. Do I content myself with the simple joys of the time we have together or should I ease myself out of this ticking relationship before my emotions become more deeply woven?

Uncertain

Dear Uncertain,

I favor enjoying the friendship and savoring the simple joys and let the future arrive whenever it arrives. A sweet love like this one is instructive to the heart; you learn so much about the pure act of giving and receiving affection and living in the present, and this will be useful to you when you’re with a guy with whom you seem to have a vast and logical future extending into infinity. You will know that the future, even a logical one, is built this morning and this afternoon and tomorrow and Saturday.

Dear Mr. Blue,

At 26, I have spent six years living with my boyfriend, Jacob (also 26). Four years ago, I was diagnosed with a degenerative auto-immune disease that has ravaged my organs and nervous system. I spend a good lot of time in hospitals and in bed. I fall frequently. I am plagued with blood clots. Most of my organs are inflamed and deficient. I have no idea if I will live four more years or 40. Jacob picks me up when I fall. He sleeps with me in hospital beds. He skips shows and invitations from friends in favor of keeping me company as I cry or freak out because I am in pain or weak or temporarily unable to use the right side of my body. We are truly in love, enjoy each other, understand and encourage each other, and are at a point where we plan to marry in the next year or two. But I worry that he will burn out. And I still haven’t come to terms with the fact that a few years ago, I was an independent, energetic, fearless woman (the woman he fell in love with) and am now a sick, scared woman. I feel that I’d be crazy to think he won’t tire of caring for me and my physical mess, and will, some sad day, take off. He is so brilliant and attractive and dear, and I worry that I am keeping him from a more free life. Yet, after losing so much of my life to this disease, I don’t think I could bear losing him, too. What to do?

Dependent and Hating It

Dear Dependent,

You are thinking right thoughts when you worry about overburdening him. These things do happen. But the fear of losing him is nothing you can take up with him: That would only make you seem pathetic. So the reasonable and difficult course is to take independent steps to regain your independence. Find other people you can confide in so he’s not the only one. Pursue aggressively the issue of pain management. And don’t think about marriage right now: Focus on the short-term good. He is with you now, and that’s good, and tomorrow is another day. You’re not keeping him from a freer life, you’re helping him become a kinder and more caring person.

Dear Mr. Blue,

I am a senior in college in the Northeast. I am half an hour from my parents’ home. I am very close to them, and they want me to move home after graduation. I want to move to the West Coast for graduate school or for a job. My dad is 67 years old and his health isn’t great. I think if I moved away and something happened to him, I would feel eternally guilty. It would be an emotional strain on my family if I moved away. But I am a little resentful that my parents want me to live a sheltered life, close to them, whereas I want to try something new. I love them dearly and I am thankful for them but I feel it’s time to fly the coop. But I don’t want to break their hearts! Any advice?

Speculative Student

Dear Speculative,

You’re going in circles, dear, and when you come back around to the idea of moving to the West Coast, stop and take that road and don’t look back. You are not responsible for your dad’s health; emotional strain comes with being a parent. Feel grateful that your parents crave your company and tell them you’re going west and then go and enjoy the freedom.

Dear Mr. Blue,

I am a college senior with a girlfriend I love very much. But I am spending most of the coming year studying in Buenos Aires, and frankly, I’d like the freedom to have sexual relationships with other people. I know my girlfriend doesn’t really see things the way I do; I know she won’t understand that I just need a little time to mess around. Is this one of those things women never understand? How do I tell her how I’m feeling without totally breaking her heart?

Imagining Argentina

Dear Imagining,

The lovely young women of Buenos Aires may not be longing for a gringo to fool around with. I don’t know. Maybe there’s a big crowd of them lined up at the airport waving handkerchiefs and all you need do is offer a couple of Hershey bars and a pair of nylons. Or maybe you could spend a miserable lonely year there, wondering what happened to your manly allure that it has no value. In any case, you tell your girlfriend now that you are going to Argentina as a single, unencumbered man and you leave no doubt about it and make it stick. A crucial part of your education is to learn how to disappoint someone and do it to her face and without craven apology or pointless explanations and let her down gracefully. Nobody grows up knowing how to do this; it must be learned. A man who never learns to do this is going to get into some truly dreadful predicaments in life.

Dear Mr. Blue,

I am a 32-year-old woman, and have been with my husband for nine years. Two years ago I had a three-month-long affair. At the time, I thought it was wild and passionate, but looking back it was just ridiculous. The good thing about the affair is that it helped my marriage; I learned to appreciate my wonderful husband more, and our sex life improved immensely.

The problem is that I sometimes feel overwhelmed with guilt over the affair. When my husband tells me how wonderful and perfect I am, I think, NO! I’m not! If only you knew!

I don’t plan to tell him about the affair. It would burden him and make him lose his trust in me. And I have no need or desire to stray again. I want to feel good about myself again, and don’t want to carry this burden around with me forever. How can I get rid of it?

Tired of the Guilt

Dear Tired,

I forgive you and so would he, though you’re right not to tell him. But perhaps you’re in need of simple narrative therapy. You call up a nice psychologist and make an appointment to sit and tell her the whole story and how you still feel lousy about what happened. It can ease your spirit to hear this come out of your own mouth and bounce off the walls and not be resonating and resonating inside your head. But to sometimes feel guilty about such a large experience is not so surprising. Life isn’t a rehearsal.

Dear Mr. Blue,

I recently befriended a girl I met at a local coffee shop. We started talking about God and faith and religion, and we formed a wonderful friendship. However, as time went on, she started falling in love with me. When she first told me this, I gently explained that I wasn’t interested, but now she shows up at my house unannounced at least three times a week, and when I ask her to leave, she won’t go. And when we hug goodbye (yes, I’m a hugger), she holds on just a little too long.

I’m growing tired of this. I’m starting to feel like I’m dating this girl against my will. Without hurting her feelings (which I know from experience are fragile), how do I tell my friend that I need my space?

Cramped

Dear Cramped,

You decide when to have the Conversation with her and then you have it. In this conversation, you are gentle but not as gentle as you’ve been before. Your gentility has been pushed hard and it must push back. Perhaps she thinks she is getting romantic inklings from you, maybe her horoscope tells her to be aggressive, maybe she senses emanations from your houseplants. Whatever, you must now cut through whatever illusions she’s under and make yourself clear. The problem is to be definite without anger, to turn up the volume slightly. But no matter how fragile her feelings, she’ll be hurt more by your indecisiveness than by your resolution.

Dear Mr. Blue,

I’m a 25-year-old woman who just moved to Los Angeles to take a job, the first meaningful, nontemp, nonclerical, non-coffee shop job I’ve had, and it didn’t hurt that Scott already lives out here. He and I have been close for about five years, but it’s been a tangled relationship. When we first met, we fell head-over-heels for each other, and dated for about six months. Since then, we’ve been “friends,” though I’ve pined away for him and he’s pined for me. It is wonderful that we have weathered so much awfulness and are still so close. The problem is, I am in love with him. And he doesn’t seem to know quite what he wants from me. We are often mistaken for a couple. We hold hands a lot. He puts his arm around me a lot. When I see him, he hugs me longer than one normally hugs a mere friend. When he stays over at my house, he cuddles up to me. We kiss, sometimes even really kiss, but nothing else. This kind of contact feels like it has to mean something.

We’ve talked about it. He knows how I feel, and he says that he loves me more than anyone, but not in a romantic way. What to do?

In Love

Dear In,

I’m afraid this is a question of your stamina and tolerance and ability to ride with the waves. He’s been as honest about his feelings as he can be and you have the choice of hanging up the phone or accepting him for the semi-demi-romantic pal that he is. My guess is that you’ll go on seeing him. (Why turn down honest affection?) And that this will be delightful and agonizing. And then something else will happen. He’ll introduce you to Bruce. Or he’ll wake up and ask you to marry him. Or he’ll move to Seattle.

Dear Mr. Blue,

I am 24, a college student, mother of a daughter, getting divorced from a horrible man. Recently, I was at a local gas station filling up my tank when a voice called out to me and it was my very first boyfriend, from when I was 14 and he was 16. We exchanged numbers and spoke a few times by phone and e-mail, and all the old feelings were there. The problem is that “John” has been married for four years and is very much in love with his wife and kids. However, one thing has led to another and we have fallen into a rather serious physical relationship. It is unlike anything I have ever felt and it is like he is a drug or something. I know we should end it and he agrees. However, there is this connection there and we are like 16 years old again. It is rather difficult to discuss. We know it is wrong and unhealthy, but every time we meet to end it, we end up in bed and not wanting to get out. Of course we should break it off, but it is so hard. What do you suggest?

Layla

Dear Layla,

You seem to have no interest in ending this affair; it’s satisfying to you, and all the guilt is his. For you, it’s exciting and fulfilling and absolutely cost-free. You don’t need me to tell you that it’s wrong. And when people do bad things with their eyes open, they dull their consciences, and this makes them dangerous to others. If you’re asking me to provide you with a conscience, I can’t. We’re each living in our own murk and darkness and trying to do the right thing. Try harder.

Dear Mr. Blue,

For the first time in years, I’m in love with the sort of man I’ve often fantasized about. We have been dating for six months now, but the problem is that I don’t know if we’ll ever manage to integrate our lives. He has half custody of a 7-year-old son, who I find very spoiled, emotionally insecure and overly possessive of his father. They sleep together. He thinks his father’s bedroom is his, too. My boyfriend has never had me stay over when his son is there. I myself have a 13-year-old daughter, who doesn’t mind if he sleeps over, and even when she was 7, I would have had men over. The four of us do things from time to time, like dinner and a movie, but his son is always a bit bratty. My boyfriend did broach the idea of the four of us going away together, but I think his son would make a fuss if his father and I were to share a room. Anyway, about two months ago I did talk to my boyfriend about how he has to teach his son to be more independent if he wants our relationship to grow, and it doesn’t look like he’s doing much about it. I wonder if I’m being too demanding, and if I should just be content with our once-a-week dates until his son matures some more. I’ve never been in this situation before and realize that there is always tons of baggage when people in their mid-40s have a relationship, but I do want to get remarried at some point and figure out a way to make this work without waiting for years. So how can I deal with this reasonably?

Disillusioned but Hopeful

Dear Disillusioned,

Don’t let a 7-year-old lead you around. Bratty kids grow up eventually. Meanwhile, forget about staying at your boyfriend’s house and don’t concern yourself with his philosophy of child-rearing. Excuse yourself from any big plans for “family” trips that seem fraught with potential for trouble. Focus on enjoying the good things between you and him and accept that this relationship is going to take time. Is it worth the investment? Only you and he know. Somewhere down deep in your heart you have a sense of this and you ought to listen to how you feel.

Dear Mr. Blue,

My boyfriend of almost five years recently proposed, I accepted and we announced our engagement to his family and mine. I’ve announced our engagement to all of my friends, and we shared the announcement with some mutual friends. My fiancé has been a confirmed bachelor until now (he’s 40 and has never been married, engaged or in a live-in relationship), and seems very reluctant to tell his fellow bachelor friends that he proposed. Some of these friends of his are in long-term, committed relationships, but they have all sworn off marriage. Fine by me. But it’s been almost a month, and he has yet to give them our happy news. When I asked why, he said that he wanted to tell them in person. So now he’s seen them all in person. I asked why, again, and he said he wanted for us to tell them together. So now we’ve seen them together. And they didn’t even notice the ring!

I’m afraid that deep down he doesn’t want to tell the members of the bachelor brotherhood, the people who know him best, because he really doesn’t want to be engaged or to get married. Plus, when people ask us about a wedding date, I say next summer, he says the summer after that. We haven’t set a date, and he avoids all conversations about specific plans. I’m very hurt, but I don’t want to push. How patient do I have to be, and when is enough, enough?

In Limbo

Dear In,

The purpose of engagement is to wave off the competition and give the couple a quiet pond of loyalty and commitment in which they can get to know each other. In olden times, engagements tended to be very short, and in modern times, when couples leap into bed on the third date, the idea of engagement is slightly quaint, but nonetheless it is there. It lets you see each other up close, socially tied to each other, and see each other’s families. Many engagements are broken (though not nearly enough), and that is always a live option right up to the playing of the Mendelssohn and the grand procession. Your boyfriend’s reluctance to tell his bachelor brotherhood is not so big an issue as the inability of the two of you to agree on a mutually acceptable wedding date. This is a pretty basic and straightforward question, and if he’s avoiding the decision, and any conversation leading up to it, it doesn’t bode well at all. Give back the ring and tell him to take a few months and think about what he wants to do. And you think about it, too. Don’t be a prisoner to convention. Don’t hurtle forward toward marriage to a man who makes you feel bad.

Dear Mr. Blue,

I am graduating from a fancy-pants law school next year, having gone to a fancy-pants college, and excelled in both places. My parents paid for everything and I’m really grateful to them for doing that. However, I have discovered I don’t really want to be a lawyer. I am at a big law firm this summer, and I don’t like the work and I don’t think I do it very well. Lawyering is not the intellectual struggle for justice I thought it would be; basically it is a grind. I’ve never had a real job before — I’m only 24 and have been in school since I was 3. Am I just being spoiled and lazy? Ungrateful? Part of me thinks I should appreciate how lucky I have been and just sit down and write those motions and briefs, and part of me wants to finish the novel I started in college, teach handicapped kids how to swim, maybe run a dog-walking service, anything but sitting in front of my computer writing boring motions for big corporations. I don’t know how, or where, to start, though, and I am getting married next June to the most amazing man I have ever met, so I can’t so easily take off for Peru.

Too Young

Dear Too,

Give lawyering a chance for a couple years. You’ve worked hard to prepare yourself and it would be a cheat to simply walk away from it on a whim. Take it as an experience. Lawyers are the closest thing we have to a conscience in this country; without them, big government and big corporations would run roughshod over us. Unlike journalists, lawyers are held to a code of ethics and when they violate it, they can lose their butts. Of course there’s drudgery — there was drudgery in your education and there’s more in your career — but it does have a noble end. Give it two years and then, if you’re not cut out for it, you can write a bestselling novel about a dog walker and use the windfall profits to build a swimming pool for handicapped kids.

Dear Mr. Blue,

I am 25 years old, and I have only been really truly deeply in love twice in my life. The first time was three years ago with an instructor of mine in college. I was very happy and rearranged some of my life to accommodate him, and then found out that he had another girlfriend. He told me this as he was dumping me. I was heartbroken. I hurt in all kinds of new and unanticipated ways, for a very long time. Betrayal was nothing I ever expected.

I got on with my life, I dated some, I had some crushes, but nothing major. Then, a year or so ago, something major. I am in love again, crazily deeply head-over-heels. He makes me very happy. He is a sweet, wonderful, funny, brilliant man, and I adore him. It is a long-distance relationship, but we manage to see one another at least once a month. I am rearranging my life again. I want to be with this man for a very long time. But the thing that scares me is how, after True Love No. 1, I’ve become a frantically jealous harpy; I have anxiety attacks, and sleepless nights, and crying jags and tantrums, imagining the insidious presence of Other Women, whole harems of them. I see deception at every turn. I have become a paranoid nitwit, and I am making myself insufferable to this man I love and driving myself insane.

And I know this, rationally, but rational me can’t seem to exorcise awful panicky me. This can’t go on, I can’t keep having sleepless worries and calling him up with peculiar probing questions. It has to stop. He makes me happy, and I want to just be happy and be with him, happily, the way I once used to be. Oh, Mr. Blue. How can I fix this? Help, help.

Green-Eyed Monster

Dear Green,

You were able to write this coherent letter about your situation and that’s a good first step. A second step would be to visit your friendly neighborhood doctor and see if you can’t get this anxiety and sleeplessness reduced. There are short-term palliative measures that simply would make life a little easier for you. There’s a new generation of nonbarbiturate sleeping pills, for example, that is safer and won’t make you dopey, and one shouldn’t underestimate the benefits of sleep. You’re not a nitwit, you’re an intelligent young woman who is obsessively chewing on your foot, and you should look for a simple temporary solution until you can join Mr. Wonderful and live happily ever after.

Dear Mr. Blue,

A college friend of mine, recently married, told me that I seem “closed off” to having a relationship and maybe this is why I’m still single. I don’t doubt her diagnosis, and I have been giving it a lot of thought. I’m a happily independent, kind-hearted, not-ugly, smart chick who has always believed that when it’s meant to happen, it will, so major, Rules-like effort in this area is usually a waste of time and guaranteed to scare people.

My understanding is that men usually flip for happily independent babes. But now I’m wondering if I’m giving off some sort of secret standoffish vibe to potentially available men, and if I have met or will meet Mr. Wonderful, I won’t know it because I’m so closed off (as my friend pointed out).

So my question: How do I unclose myself to the idea of a relationship without driving men away reeking of desperation?

Open for Business

Dear Open,

Romance happens between individuals and any generalizations about when it happens and to whom are strictly for amusement and not meant to be taken seriously. I can tell you that most men are incapable of close friendships with other men and are in search of women confidantes and when a man finds one, a woman he can talk easily to and who he trusts and who welcomes his affection, then that’s the doorway to romance. But it’s not particularly useful advice to a woman. (How does one go about being a confidante to a dullard or a bully?) You describe yourself as happily independent and that’s all to the good, not because it makes you more attractive to men but simply because it’s a good way to live. If this gives off some secret vibe to potential suitors, too bad for them: The vibe is in their minds, not yours. When you meet a man you consider wonderful, you’ll know it, and you’ll let him know that you know it, and until then, don’t second-guess yourself.

: Garrison Keillor is the author of the Lake Wobegon novel "Liberty" (Viking) and the creator and host of the nationally syndicated radio show "A Prairie Home Companion," broadcast on more than 500 public radio stations nationwide. For more columns by Keillor, visit his column archive. More Garrison Keillor

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Spoiler alert! What makes a great ending?

Books with terrific conclusions are hard to find, but they're even harder to talk about

By Laura Miller

Topics:Fiction, Books, Jeffrey Eugenides, Writers and Writing

The endings of novels are, in their own way, as crucial as the endings of years, but they are much less discussed. Any bibliophile can rattle off at least a handful of famous first lines (“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…;” “It is a truth universally acknowledged…; ” “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen,” and so on), but ask someone to quote a memorable closer and chances are all they can come up with is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” (from “The Great Gatsby”) or James Joyce’s rhapsodic “…and yes I said yes I will Yes.”

The trick of a good ending, of course, is that it must capture and equal everything that has gone before. The line “He loved Big Brother” (from a novel that ends as masterfully as it begins) means very little until you understand exactly who Big Brother is. A first line or opening scene need only arrest a reader’s attention and stoke her curiosity; a final scene or paragraph is expected to provide that sensation so rare in real life: completion. The better the book, the more nuanced and persuasive, the more difficult this is. We want a novel to swell with a sense of limitless possibility at the start and in the middle, but we also want it to zero in to a point of inevitability as it ends.

For this reason, last lines, like first ones, often suffer from a bad case of Trying Too Hard. Any writer can swoop up from the particularities of character or story to assert a magisterial generality and come across as terribly grand. If you like the 100,000 words that come before it, this tactic sorta works. Yet so many endings sound a note of profundity without actually being profound. (I confess that, lovely as Fitzgerald’s famous last sentence is, it doesn’t strike me as any truer than his equally famous remark about there being no second acts in American life.)

Better the last line or final scene that’s more modest in its language yet still packs a wallop; the success of such endings, when they succeed, is fully earned. Take the closing of “The Marriage Plot,” by Jeffrey Eugenides, one of my favorite novels of 2011. The last word, in a witty riposte to “Ulysses” (for this is a book that’s partly about other books), is “Yes,” but it has a very different import. Alas, only those of you who have already read the novel will understand what I mean.

The main drawback to swapping notes about favorite endings is the spoiler problem. The last line of Sarah Waters’ sublime 2009 ghost story “The Little Stranger” is like a key that unlocks the entire narrative, but I can’t tell you why in case you haven’t yet read it. Earlier this year, researchers demonstrated that readers enjoyed stories more when they knew in advance how they would end, but the belief persists that an untimely revelation of plot points will ruin the experience.

Even if we set such objections aside, when you wish to make the case for a particular ending, you still have to summarize the novel for whoever hasn’t already read it, and what summary is ever as good as the book itself? An exception, which can be related without giving much away, is the ironic last scene from Matthew Kneale’s excellent historical novel, “English Passengers,” a book, published in 2000, that captures the absurd hubris and brutal practice of colonialism in Tasmania. One of the supporting characters is a British scientist intent on proving the inferiority of nonwhite races by examining their skulls. By the novel’s last page, he is dead, and via a series of mix-ups, his own bones are displayed in an exhibition in a London museum, marked “Unknown male, presumed Tasmanian aborigine, possible victim of human sacrifice.” Yes, it’s essentially a joke, but one that distills the self-delusion of racialism in a single placard, and one that’s perfectly in tune with the novel behind it.

What are your favorite fictional endings, Salon readers? Share them in the comments thread below.

Further reading:

The Association for Psychological Science on how stories aren’t spoiled by spoilers

Salon’s review of “The Marriage Plot” by Jeffrey Eugenides

Salon’s review of “English Passengers” by Matthew Kneale

Salon’s review of “The Little Stranger” by Sarah Waters

: Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller

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Writing class from hell

As "Seminar" hits Broadway, novelist Ben Marcus judges the tyrannical writing teachers of stage and screen

By Laura Miller

Alan Rickman appears at the curtain call for the opening night performance of the Broadway play "Seminar," on Nov. 20, 2011. (Credit: AP/Charles Sykes)

Topics:Writers and Writing, Ben Marcus, Alan Rickman, Theater, Books

“Seminar,” a play starring Alan Rickman as a preening, acid-tongued teacher running roughshod over a group of tender aspiring writers, opened a few weeks ago on Broadway. Reviews have prompted all the usual observations about the difficulty of dramatizing both writing and reading, activities so internally momentous yet so physically inert. Why, then, do people keep doing it? And do the depictions of writing classes in stage, film and television — from “Wonder Boys” to “Bored to Death” — bear any relationship to real life?

To hash this out, I invited Ben Marcus — a novelist and an associate professor at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, where he teaches fiction writing — to see “Seminar” with me and talk afterward about the ways writing workshops are depicted in the performing arts. His first novel was acquired by the writer, editor and teacher Gordon Lish, considered to be the inspiration for the character played by Rickman, and Marcus also attended one of Lish’s legendary seminars, conducted in private homes, like the class in the play. (Marcus’ fourth book, the novel “The Flame Alphabet,” will be published in January.)

We found Theresa Rebeck’s play amusing and pointed — right down to a reference to the bi-coastal literary magazine Tin House — despite the fact that it doesn’t bear much resemblance to any writing class we’d ever encountered. That, we concluded, might be for the best.

When characters are discussing writing in a dramatic work like “Seminar,” the things they say are so sweeping compared to the more detailed focus of an actual writing class. But what also struck me in this play is how the concept of writing and of being a writer is so intensely romanticized.

Also, the students have no ability to determine their own value for themselves. That’s the great conceit the whole play is riding on, that these people can’t begin to make a decision for themselves. That makes them funny, silly and ultimately vulnerable.

I noticed some of that with Gordon Lish. There were degrees of vulnerability around him. On one hand, it was easy for some people to blame him for his forcefulness, but with people who weren’t quite as vulnerable, I think that they thrived and got a lot more out of it. They got to listen to him talk inside and out about a piece of writing and to see that he could be deeply perceptive and that he cared about fiction more than anything else in the world.

The people who got caught up in the theater of winning his approval instead of, say, deriving their own system of self-worth, they didn’t seem to fare so well.

Would you say that some of the people who went to his seminars were like the characters in this play? Like a lot of writing students in movies and TV, they seem to be in the class for the sole purpose of getting a verdict on their work from some big-time authority figure.

In the students, I didn’t really recognize anybody I’ve ever seen. There are little bits here and there, but the thing I really didn’t recognize is the sort of blatant and publicly articulated desperation. There’s one character, the one who’s using his connection to his famous uncle, who is a very enjoyable stereotype. But anyone who behaved that way in front of any writing student I know — people would be horrified by that. Most people are self-aware enough not to behave the way that guy does.

But even if people don’t behave that way that doesn’t necessarily mean …

… that they don’t think that way, no. You could argue that it’s the play’s job to externalize that stuff because it’s funnier to see everybody acting on their demons and their craven desires. It’s more entertaining.

There’s stuff that, as the teacher, you don’t necessarily see. I once taught this class, maybe five years ago. It just never gelled. There was something strange about it. I just thought that I sucked because I couldn’t get them going. The semester ended, and I ran into someone who’d been in the class. That person then told me about this elaborate set of dramas that was going on among the students. There was a broken love triangle, someone who tried to kill someone else and they hated each other. It was just insane! I had no idea. They were consumed by their own drama.

Speaking of drama, the play takes the position that writing is a completely tortured experience.

Tortured and joyless, with no possible good outcome for anyone. One of the funny things that Alan Rickman’s character does is that he gives these predictions about everyone else’s future: This is what your life will be, in these funny monologues. The most talented one, who was writing the best work, he’s got a miserable future ahead, totally miserable. There’s no redeeming thing about it at all!

He’s going to end up like the Alan Rickman character.

A big difference that I would cite from Gordon Lish, is that he didn’t have any of the buffoonery of the Rickman character. He wasn’t self-important or grandiose, with the bragging, the travel and the overt sexual stuff. I think there was clearly a big ego there, but he was also very modest in person. His feeling was, “I will never do really great work, but maybe you will. If you think about these things, maybe you will. It’s too late for me.” The drama was about whether or not you could get behind his enthusiasms.

The thing he did that might be construed as abusive was that he was interested in pitting people against each other. Let’s say we have Smith and Dale: Smith might write something interesting and Gordon would say, “Dale, what’s your answer to that? How are you going to sleep at night knowing that your buddy here has written something so good?”

I think the pedagogical idea is that you might work harder if you feel competitive with your peers. Sometimes he would create competitions, but other times the students just weren’t biting.

What the Alan Rickman character does — his long, irrelevant, self-glorifying digressions about his adventures in various kinds of disaster tourism — well, maybe Gordon Lish didn’t do that, but I’ve certainly heard about a lot of writing teachers who do.

It struck me as a more old-fashioned, first-wave creative-writing model. The famous writer is trucked into the Midwestern university. He’s drunk all the time and he makes these pronouncements. You don’t even get your work read, but you sit at his feet and listen to these drunken tales and that counts as some kind of instruction.

I got my MFA about 20 years ago, a little more. Then, there wasn’t much of an established tradition of actual instruction. Now, 20 years later, if there are 12 students in the class, the students are getting back 11 copies of a submitted work, plus the instructor’s, with intensive line editing and one-and-a-half to two-page, single-spaced typed criticism — more criticism on this apprentice work of fiction than you get when you publish a book. This feedback machine has been created, giving students some pretty substantive criticism. That, I think, takes the spotlight away from the instructor as this Svengali figure who makes these pronouncements that are going to lead to some shattering revelation.

Enjoyable as those revelations are to watch on stage! Another thing you don’t see in the play is the idea that there are different types of literary traditions, each equally valid, the idea that good writing can be something other than opening a vein on the page. One of the characters writes a fake memoir about a transvestite Cuban gang member that completely deceives them all until she tells them with great amusement that she’s the one who wrote it. They all think it’s fantastic before that, but it’s still presented as a debased thing for her to do.

Well, she’s taking a sort of superficial bait by going for this supposedly gritty, real-world authenticity that the teacher wants. There’s a little bit of satire in there, right, because she can actually ape this form perfectly and she makes a successful piece of writing. It says something about how we value the personal stories behind the writers. If it’s a book about the streets, we want the writer to be …

… of the streets.

Yeah. You see that when you’re promoting a book. No one’s interested in talking about the actual book. They want to talk about the person who wrote it. What bad things happened to you that we can talk about? So the play does some funny satire about our desire for the “real” by also showing that someone can fake it. It’s just a style. It’s artificial and anyone can do it.

Then there’s the figure of the young woman who writes a lot about sex, and she’s very pretty and fully prepared to capitalize on that, and this generates a lot of bogus interest in her work. Now, that’s not an unfamiliar kind of writer, but sometimes the writers who fit that profile are actually really good writers as well.

They are.

They’re more mediagenic, and many people resent them for that, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t be talented, too. In the play, that character is sympathetic, very grounded. But she’s also a slapdash person who isn’t committed to doing good work. She’s likable, but she’s supposed to be a contemptible writer.

She didn’t have any gravitas at all. But then gravitas is often an awful thing to encounter when you’re teaching. It doesn’t correlate to anything. When it’s attached to really poor work, it’s torture.

Each of the students had to play a certain type, right? They all play really well. There is the glib, competent, self-promotional one. And there’s the sullen genius who refuses to show his work to anyone — but that’s where it all starts to fall apart. He, in the end, is immune to the praise that he’s so covetous of.

It’s meant to show his integrity, I guess.

Yet he was still there, still soaking it all in.

He’s the character who dissents from the seminar and has a distance from it in a way that the audience shares. He’s a skeptic about everyone else’s shtick, recognizing it as shtick, which is what the audience is doing, too.

It’s funny to see these types, but it would have been funnier if their writing didn’t correspond to their type in such an obvious way. Because, too often, the self-important, brooding genius type — that guy is bad. He’s so bad.

Yes! In real life, the guy who is melodramatic and idealistic and angry about the importance of writing, and just so grandiose about it, is also the person who lacks the subtlety or wit or humor or perspective to be a really good writer.

There’s really the biggest myth of all that’s propagated by the play, which is that somebody’s persona has a lot to do with the quality of their writing. That’s just never true. Sometimes, it’s the dull, plain person who turns in totally killer, electrifying writing. Sometimes the really dynamic, witty, amazing person just dies on the page after the first sentence. Or, sometimes the really talented person is just a complete sweetheart. Just a really nice person. The whole notion of equating somebody’s personality with what they’re capable of creatively just falls apart very, very quickly.

One of the characters takes a job as a ghostwriter, and that’s treated as a fatal deal with the devil. Once you take a step in that direction, you are doomed as an Artist. She couldn’t possibly learn anything from it. That doesn’t take into account how Hemingway’s early work as a reporter affected his fiction, let alone the fact that a number of revered novelists — Don DeLillo, Peter Carey — started out working in advertising.

It’s really a portrait of a certain kind of idealism that you can only have before you’ve done anything. It’s of a certain age and a certain stage.

But if you’ve never gotten past that stage, or have only seen it from the outside, it might seem like the way all writers are. Which is why the play convinces its audience, perhaps.

Everybody was laughing.

Laughing in a very knowing way, too! I get the impression that the image many people have of writing classes comes from this sort of depiction.

What’s funny to me is that, as far as I know, instruction in some of the other art forms doesn’t seem as available for satire and derision. Why aren’t we making fun of people making mud sculptures and the pretensions of teaching in the visual arts world?

That’s especially puzzling because when it comes to visual arts, you can actually show the audience what the characters are making.

And, oh my God, it’s even worse. I’ve seen it firsthand. They say things that, if you wrote them down — there’s nothing there. The kind of faux theory shit that comes up is so crazy and meaningless. It should be made fun of so much more! And yet, we don’t treat the formal study of painting as if it were a joke. We don’t question that someone might want to go to art school.

Or music school.

Boy, that just seems like it would be the last subject for comedy, right? A music class in graduate school. And yet, when it comes to writing classes: “Ha, ha, ha! What morons! They think they can get together and talk about writing!”

What is that? There’s the whole “Writing can’t be taught” thing. I was once at a dinner, and at the other end of the table there was a gray eminence writer, whom I won’t name, who said, when asked if he taught, “Writing can’t be taught.” And I, a smartass 20-something, leaned over and said, “You mean you can’t teach it.” Because how does he know? That’s like me announcing, “Cello can’t be taught!” because I can’t teach it.

I think a lot of stuff does get taught and it can be talked about. I think writing is a craft. Language is the medium and you make things with it. But, you’re right. This play isn’t for people like me. It’s for people who have a vague idea about what goes on in a writing class. It’s a rough enough sketch, and it’s funny enough. It would be dour to demand realism from that play. It would be ridiculous. It would just take the entertainment away. I would never go to a play that was accurate about teaching. My God!

: Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller

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How my book became part of the “satanic sex stabbing”

My werewolf guide was found at the scene of a gruesome crime, but what chilled me was the media panic that followed

By Ritch Duncan

My book became part of a satanic sex stabbing

Left, Rebecca Chandler (left) and right, Raven "Scarlett" Larrabee (Credit: thesmokinggun.com)

Topics:Writers and Writing

On the night I heard about my connection to a “satanic sex ritual stabbing,” I had just finished the dishes with my wife. It was about 10 p.m. on a Wednesday, my 2-year-old daughter was asleep in bed, and I was in the living room, casually catching up on email. “I assume you’ve seen this,” a friend wrote. The link took me to a headline on Gawker.com:

“Satanic Sex Ritual Threesome Not as Awesome as It Sounds.”

The post was accompanied by the menacing mugshots of two young, dark-haired Goth chicks. The first girl, Rebecca Chandler, defiantly faced down the camera with piercing eyes, her angular face tightened into a spiteful glare. The second, Raven “Scarlett” Larrabee, looked a little less aggressive, instead opting for a well-practiced look of high school derision, accentuated by wavy black hair that almost completely obscured the right side of her face. The pictures looked like casting photos from the clever feminist horror flick of the early 2000s, “Ginger Snaps,” about two teenage sisters coping not only with periods and puberty but the fact that one of them was slowly turning into a werewolf.

I know all about this film, and dozens of others like it, as I’m something of a werewolf expert. In 2009, along with fellow comedy writer Bob Powers, I wrote a humorous self-help book for werewolves, titled “The Werewolf’s Guide to Life: A Manual for the Newly Bitten.” It included friendly tips for lycanthropes to safely manage their condition, survive their “moons,” and live safe, productive, nonviolent lives. It included dozens of helpful graphs and charts and featured illustrations by the very funny cartoonist Emily Flake. This illustration, for example, demonstrates the perils of leaving one’s wedding ring on during a transformation:

But back to the blog post:

Last week, a 19-year-old guy from Arizona took the bus to Milwaukee to meet a girl (Chandler) he knew from the internet. On arrival, he discovered that she and her roommate wanted to have a kinky, possibly Satanic, threesome. So far, so awesome. And then came the part where he was stabbed and slashed 300 times.

Well, that just got a lot less funny. But the real sucker punch came when I got to the part about the reading material on their table.

According to Chandler, the sex and stabbing were both consensual, but “got out of hand” (at least, the stabbing did). Chandler also says that Larrabee did “the majority of” the cutting, and that Larrabee was “involved in satanic or occult activities”; in their apartment, the cops found a bunch of books that sounds like they were purchased at the local Hot Topic, including The Necromantic Ritual Book and The Werewolf’s Guide to Life.

That was my book. At a crime scene. Seized by police and entered into evidence at a bloody, murderous crime scene. A bloody, murderous satanic crime scene. A bloody, murderous satanic sexual crime scene.

My body went numb. Was there another “Werewolf’s Guide to Life” out there – like, an evil one? No, that was stupid. Of course it was my book. My stomach ached, and I grew dizzy. It was the same creeping nausea I used to get when I was bombing onstage as a standup comic, but this had an added horror. My joke wasn’t just being misunderstood; underneath my minor panic attack was far darker question: Could my humor book about nonexistent monsters inspire a real-life murder?

I called my coauthor Bob, and after rereading the article and several others, I was relieved to discover that the victim of the encounter was not dead, would apparently make a full recovery, and did not appear to be pressing charges. None of this information was apparent from any of the sensational headlines.

I began to calm down a little. Bob reminded me that our book is shelved in the humor section, and there is nothing in it that encourages violence. Even if one were deluded enough to believe it was true, it’s still 200 pages of instruction on how NOT to hurt yourself or others. If those two girls were into the occult (an assertion that is by no means proven), it’s possible they might also enjoy a funny werewolf book. But it makes about as much sense to include that book as evidence that a satanic sexual bloodletting took place as it would a VHS copy of “Teen Wolf Too” starring Jason Bateman. (And yes, “too” is the proper spelling.)

Over the next 24 hours, we watched powerlessly as the story went viral. MSNBC published a story ominously stating that police recovered “a copy of a necromantic ritual book titled ‘Werewolf’s Guide to Life.’”

They weren’t alone. Our book was repeatedly positioned in story after story as though it contained ancient satanic secrets, or was torn straight from the pages of Aleister Crowley’s diary. England’s Daily Mail featured the cover of our book under a headline that screamed: “Two female room-mates ‘tied up teenager and cut him 300 times during two-day satanic sex torture marathon.” The caption for the book’s picture read: “Odd books including ‘The Werewolf’s Guide to Life’ were found in the pair’s apartment.”

Glenn Beck went on the radio and amazingly used the incident to align Wisconsin satanism with the union organization in that state, the Occupy Wall Street movement, and an ancient god named Baal — and even threw in Hitler at the end, because that is an entirely normal and logical leap to make. The original title of Beck’s post, by the way, was “Man Killed in Satanic Ritual.” A correction added later thanked Internet commenters for pointing out his error.

Our book went on to be misrepresented in many different languages, including Chinese and Dutch, the latter of which (according to Google translator) claimed “The Werewolf’s Guide to Life” was “A book of black magic rituals.” No one mentioned that our book came out in 2009, maybe because the story doesn’t sound as sexy if the terrifying occult book found at the blood-drenched altar of Satan came out the same year as “Ice Age 3.”

We eventually found our sense of humor about it. I wrote an official response for our blog. Bob joked about it on Facebook, and we hoped it would help us sell thousands of books (so far, no luck).

But fun as it was to be swept along in this, it also kind of sucked. There may be no such thing as bad publicity, but the book these articles described certainly wasn’t ours. If you did happen to be looking for a step-by-step guide on how to murder people for Satan as part of a two-day sex binge, one look on Amazon would tell you our book wasn’t that.

Even worse than being misrepresented in the media was how lazy it all seemed to be. If the reporters charged with covering this story actually spent five seconds looking up what the book was about (they certainly had the time to do a Google search and steal an image of the cover), they could have mentioned it was filed under the “humor/parody” section. To be fair, some journalists, including the Smoking Gun, did. Gawker came close, questioning the book’s real-life satanic qualifications with the Hot Topic quip.

But as I read more of these stories, I came to the depressing conclusion that it wasn’t laziness to blame, it was tailoring. In story after story, the facts of the case actually seemed less important than the details that appealed to a particular website’s niche. Those that worked were pushed forward, and those that weren’t got held back. And if I were going to complain of shoddy treatment, I got off easy compared to what those girls had to endure. Just to pick one example, a website called BroBible ran the mugshots, of course, and then opened with these lines: “How kinky are these sluts? Better yet, how pathetic is the poor bastard who took a bus FROM ARIZONA to Milwaukee just to have sex with them?”

It’s safe to say that something strange and horrible happened that night in Wisconsin, but something strange and horrible is also going on when the images of two young girls who haven’t been convicted of any crime can be rocketed around the globe, and the facts of their lives ignored or twisted. What happened for sure was those of us clucking our tongues, gasping and laughing as we read this story weren’t getting the truth about those girls, not by any stretch. And that certainly isn’t a new phenomenon.

Earlier this year, the men known as the West Memphis Three were released after almost two decades in prison. Their story, popularized in the award-winning documentary “Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills,” told the tale of three teenagers convicted of child murder despite a notoriously bungled investigation. Though the crimes were different, that story has a fair bit in common with the satanic-sex tale: The defendants had scary mug shots. They were “weird kids” who never seemed to have their act together. They were outsiders. In that particular case, the boys listened to scary-sounding music like Metallica, while Chandler and Larrabee read scary-sounding things like “Intro to Sigilborne Spirits” and — GASP — “The Werewolf’s Guide to Life.” But both stories thrived on a fundamental mistrust of what is different.

No one wants to look at the story of Chandler and Larrabee as the story of two people. Instead, it’s another piece of Internet content, and showing the whole truth takes the fun out of it. In the age of the hit count, this story had all the elements of a traffic monster: blood, sex, Satan, and a couple of evil-looking young girls straight out of central casting. Their mug shots made for a splendid movie poster, and our book was the cardboard standup in the lobby. Whatever really happened was so much less entertaining than what could have happened, so why not use technically true words that make the story what they wanted it to be?

Why use words like “poked” or “pricked” 300 times when you can say “slashed” or “stabbed”? Why mention that the victim went there of his own free will when you can say he was “lured by the promise of sex”? Why frontload the fact that he wasn’t pressing charges, or was recovering at home, when it’s so much more delicious to let the reader believe he’d been murdered? And what the hell, if there’s a book that sounds dangerous, why let people know that it’s supposed to be funny?

Whether Rebecca Chandler and Raven Larrabee are guilty of a crime, I don’t know. Was this the story of two cold-blooded, evil satanists whose ritual of sex, blood and murder was thwarted by police? Or was it a case of two relatively harmless wannabe wiccans who hadn’t mastered the concept of a safe word? Likely, the truth lies somewhere in between. But if we don’t know the answer to that question, it is worth asking: How good was this story? Was it worth the treatment those young women received as story after story about them filled with lies and half-truths spread all over the world? Because that’s what these ghastly novelty articles look like to me — a grievous wounding, by hundreds of little cuts.

: Ritch Duncan is a writer and comedian living in New York City. Manageable samples of his vast body of work can be found at twitter.com/ritchied. More Ritch Duncan

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My Brilliant Second Career: The surprising leap from Viagra sales to journalism

After I was laid off from a Fortune 100 company, I gave up the corporate dream -- and began pursuing my own

By Amy McVay Abbott

(Credit: Maisei Raman via Shutterstock)

Topics:My Brilliant Second Career, Life stories, Writers and Writing, Great Recession

This is a series about people who stared down the Great Recession -- and reinvented themselves along the way. Do you have a great Plan B success story? Post it on Open Salon, tag it "My Brilliant Second Career," and we might publish it on Salon -- and pay you for it.

Jon Stewart was particularly pithy that Thursday night in January 2009. For weeks, my husband and I had been witnessing the economic roller coaster on television. But now, as we watched Stewart joke on “The Daily Show” about the Fortune 100 companies who’d laid off workers, it was horrifyingly personal. I was among them.

For nearly a decade, I had the mother of all sales jobs as a pharmaceutical sales representative; I sold Viagra and other medicines to urologists, family practice and internal medicine doctors. That Thursday morning, I’d been instructed to sit at home by my phone from 9 to 9:30 a.m. and wait for the call that would determine my professional future. The phone rang at 9 sharp; my district manager, awkward and stuttering, read a prepared text to inform me that I had been terminated. Later, I learned that he’d lost his own job the day before.

So, after years making great money, enjoying “Cadillac benefits” and the opportunity to travel the country on someone else’s dime, I found myself at a crossroads: an unemployed 50-something woman whose only child had recently left for college 1,000 miles away. I had worked in healthcare marketing and sales for nearly 30 years. What was I going to do now?

The change not only threw my life path and family finances into question, but it also shook up the ground rules we had lived by in our two-and-a-half decade marriage. Since I could barely hard-boil an egg, my husband, a college librarian, had always done the cooking. But now it only made sense for me to take on that responsibility. Meanwhile, my husband had grown accustomed to having time alone in the evenings after a long day at the university. Now, he found me practically charging him at the door with the outdated words: “How was your day, dear?” Our marriage seemed headed back to the 1950s, a prospect we both found disconcerting.

During the dull, gray days of that Indiana winter, I sat alone in our big, quiet house, wondering what to do next. I completed the company’s outplacement training and perfected my résumé. But there were no jobs for me, despite my decades of experience; going back into pharma sales would be nearly impossible. My company cut nearly 4,000 reps that day, and competitors were doing the same thing.

The thought of carving out a new territory at this stage of my life was daunting. But there was one dream I’d been putting off in favor of the more stable and lucrative life in the corporate world: to be a writer. Long ago, I’d been a journalism major in college. During my last few years in college, I interned at a small daily, the Columbia City Post and Mail. The 1970s newsroom was straight out of a movie. Edwin, our police reporter, wandered in and out of the office in his rumpled suit, holding a lit cigarette with an inch of ash hanging off the end. Eloise, on the copy desk, lit me up when I turned in my first story with several misspellings.

As I applied for jobs that didn’t interest me, or that screamed “Wanted: Beautiful twenty-something with Ivy League education,” I couldn’t help thinking back to Fitzgerald’s fabled advice to Faulkner, “Write what you know.” I know it sounds hackneyed. And I know that no sane person would want to work for newspapers, which were folding all over the country. But maybe that’s what ultimately sold me on the plan: What did I have to lose?

Three decades after I walked out of the Post and Mail’s newsroom, I tried to find my way back in. I contacted the managing editor and offered a free biweekly column. I had been journaling on my own, and already had a ready-made stack of essays on everything from angst over job loss to my defiant hatred of pickles. The managing editor was excited to get new content. She told me she would try it for a few months.

Why write for free? That’s an easy answer. Small papers don’t have the budget for columns, and more than income at that point, I needed an audience. It’s the same calculation made by countless bloggers, hoping that once people read my material they’d eventually be willing to pay for more; it’s just that my forum was a bit more old-fashioned than the Internet and, it turned out, so was my content. I wrote about growing up in small-town Indiana in the 1960s. I wrote about the people and places that nurtured me, the strange and endearing characters of that village, like the piano teacher with the full concert grand in her living room or the perennially young manager of the skating arena who whipped around the rink in his white, sparkling skates to classic skating tunes like “Louie Louie.”

Sometimes, I wrote about nothing. I wrote about disposing of kitty litter that had frozen in a huge, obscene clump in a garbage bag in the snow. I wrote about learning to cook, and the various mistakes I made along the way. It was working: I started getting letters from people with whom my reflections resonated. People told me their own stories, and they asked me to write more.

I suppose that it’s strange that the success of my new job involved nostalgia for another time. But so much about our lives now is harried and ever-changing; I think my columns were a way to remember and take comfort in a not-too-distant past. I’m not sure if life actually was easier then; but in our memory, it certainly feels like it was.

Armed with new clips, I landed a real assignment at a local woman’s magazine, one that paid. More articles spawned more work, and I began to write for an increasing number of area and regional publications. Last July, I self-published a book, “The Luxury of Daydreams,” which earned solid local reviews and brought more income, which I supplement by writing Web content and editorial material for healthcare organizations, a remnant from my prior work life.

While I’ll never make the salary I earned, I am making a living. As an independent contractor I can turn down assignments I don’t like and focus on the ones I do. I’m no longer chained to the golden handcuffs of corporate culture. There is no annual territory restructuring, no competitive intel on the new erectile dysfunction drug. I control my destiny.

Work fulfillment does not, however, pay the bills. I drive an 11-year-old Accord with peeling paint and nearly 100,000 miles. Going out for dinner is a special occasion, instead of the way I cope with frequent exhaustion and stress from a rigorous and inflexible corporate culture.

Working for myself is challenging, but life can accommodate more change and growth than we realize. Just three years ago I made an excellent living selling promises of sexual fulfillment and freedom from incontinence. The money rolled in, but I always wanted a new purse, or shoes, or a vintage fountain pen. There was always a bonus next quarter, a carrot dangling on the end of a stick. Now, I’m cautious with every dollar I’ve earned. It’s not easy. But I’m no longer selling someone else’s dream; I’m living my own.

: Amy McVay Abbott is a freelance writer in southern Indiana. Her book "The Luxury of Daydreams" is available at all major online sites and for immediate download on Nook and Kindle. More Amy McVay Abbott

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Three cheers for Stephen King!

The bestselling author vows to help fellow residents of Bangor, Maine, after federal home-heating aid is cut

By Emma Mustich

Stephen King. (Credit: AP/Mark Lennihan)

Topics:Writers and Writing

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been spotlighting examples of conspicuous consumption we think are particularly out of touch — from Neiman Marcus’ $75,000 luxury yurt to the $5,200, crystal-encrusted baby bathtub Beyoncé and Jay-Z have reportedly received from Kelly Rowland. At a time of economic uncertainty, these over-the-top, flamboyant demonstrations of wealth surely sound a sour note in the ears of many Americans.